Community 24/7
My one amazing taste of intentional community came in the eight months I spent at Mount Carmel Bible College in Edmonton, Alberta. I remember Trevor pointing out that in one of Brian McLaren's earlier books he discusses what a 'new' style of Christian education would look like - that it would have an educational component, a service component and a discipleship component. Well, in a Brethren church in Edmonton, Alberta, a little school was started forty years ago this year that provides just that. By limiting its student body to no more than 40 students per year; by providing between 10 - 12 staff members; by limiting the length of the course to just eight months; by partnering with local community organizations, including L'Arche, Open Door and YWAM; and by providing regular small group and one-on-one points of discipleship, students who participate in Mount Carmel's Advanced Diploma receive a 'life-in-the-real-world' Christian education.
I lived in a house with four other girls in a townhouse complex about a mile from the school. Within our complex was another house with six guys living in it, and a third and fourth house, both of which housed Mount Carmel alumni. Together, we learned how to live in community - how to share household finances, dishes and cooking; how to laugh together and learn together and worship together and pray together.
Having had a fairly good biblical grounding as a child, the class that stuck out to me the most at Carmel was Christian Life. Many of the lessons from that class opened my eyes to the fact that God's vision for the world was far bigger than any I could possibly have for it. Reading Stanley Grenz's 'Created for Community' for our introduction to Theology class wasn't a bad idea, either.
In our service component I taught ESL to a woman who ... may have been a legal immigrant. Her 'husband', who had secured her the visa, had left, and her status was precarious at best. I also spent five hours a week at L'Arche, time which I have been forever grateful for. Finally, I traveled with most of the rest of our 26-strong student body around Alberta visiting the school's supporting churches, joining in with their services by bringing worship, enjoying their potluck lunches and being put up in their homes. We also traveled up to Key-Way-Tin Bible College - a Native American bible college on reserve land about four hours north of Edmonton - and to Vancouver to work on the Lower East Side for ten days.
When I look back on that time I am amazed at how much God taught me - how much I was privileged to experience and learn from, both at the time, and ever since. But as much as I loved Carmel, the people, and Alberta as a whole, I always knew it was not for me to stay.
Back to Mississauga
Well, back via four months in England. I left Carmel in April, went and spent four months in England meeting my soon-to-be-in-laws, bumping forward our wedding date by a year ('cos we were too impatient to wait!) and experiencing a healthy dose of culture shock. Its a worthwhile experience to have, especially if you're going to minister to refugees and new immigrants!
I got back to Mississauga in September and began my degree at the University of Toronto at Mississauga (I eventually graduated with a BA in History). Trevor came out the following June, and we were married July 10, 1999. By Christmas of 1999 my dad was dropping hints that perhaps I might like to find a pregnancy test ... and although the ones I'd done before Christmas were all negative, he was correct and I was indeed pregnant! While this made life more ... challenging, shall we say, I did have a baby (Kaitlyn Joy) in September of 2000, and finished my degree in May of the following year.
The first year and a half we were married we lived on married student residence at the U of T. When we first moved in, I decided I wanted to know the people we lived nearby, so I made up masses of baking and took it around to people as an excuse to knock on their doors and find out what their names were. When one couple moved in about a month after us, I went and knocked with the requisite goodies and found out that they were painting. So I went and put on some paint clothes so that I could help them. It always seemed natural - I wanted to be a part of people's lives, and have relationship with them, regardless of whether it caused any of them to want to be Christian's or not.
The second winter we were there I became very close friends with a fellow student who had found out that she was pregnant just a couple of weeks after her husband was put into jail. She already had a daughter from a teen pregnancy, and had been looking forward so much to having children together with someone, and now she was alone. In the end, I was able to be there with her through the pregnancy and the birth, and eventually was also able to be there with her as she gave her testimony and was baptized.
Along the College's Way
When I graduated in May of 2001, we didn't move very far away - we had a traditional evangelical church that we were quite happy with, and my family was close by, as was Trevor's work, so when a house became available in our price range (a miracle in and of itself!) we jumped at the chance. We began to settle in, again, trying to build strong relationships in a transitional neighbourhood - never an easy task. We found there were many challenges in relating to our neighbours, many of whom hadn't finished high school, much less university - but also many things which made it easier - namely that they had a tendency to sit on their front steps and chat for hours at a time in the evenings and on weekends, whilst watching (or ignoring) the children playing all around.
The Long, Dark Night of the Soul
In November of 2001, Trevor lost his job, and I became pregnant again. Trevor was out of work for 3 1/2 months, and it was by the grace of God and the generosity of our church family - who brought meals, boxes of food, offered rides, and left anonymous gifts in our mail box - that we got through. It was also through their network of contacts that Trevor eventually did find another job.
Two weeks after Trevor started work, I had my 18-week ultrasound. I saw immediately in the scan that the baby had club foot, just like I had. When I pointed it out to the ultrasonographer, she tightened her lips and turned the screen away, and I cried. The scan was a lot longer than usual, and I wasn't in the slightest bit surprised when my midwife called me that evening to chat. What did surprise me was just how serious everyone was. They rushed me down to the High Risk clinic at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto early the following week, where we heard the most devastating words of our life ... "The baby has Trisomy 18" ... "its a condition which is 'incompatible with life'". We eventually found out that this wasn't entirely true. Through hours of research, and the support of the Trisomy 18 Foundation's then-fledgling community, we began to come to terms with the fact that our son's life may be fragile and very brief.
Jeremiah Edward Morgan was born by emergency cesarean section at 3:06am on Saturday, August 17th, 2002. After four days in the hospital, he was sent home with a partially completed death certificate and an inoperable heart defect. At 1:22am on Saturday, September 7th, 2002, Jeremiah Edward Morgan went to be with Jesus.
And our world was shattered.
Just five months later, our pastor, who we loved dearly, died of pancreatic cancer at just 50.
*****
When I think back on that time I am amazed at the ability of the human mind and body to cope with so much anger, and so much grief and so much pain. Because I have lived through it, there are no trite answers. There are no easy fixes. The pain is too deep, the scars too fragile, to ever feel whole - and yet five years later I feel I can function again, I can breathe again, I can hope again. And after last week, I know I can hold a little tiny baby again. That is the grace of God.
Putting the Pieces back together
From the day Jeremiah died till May of 2003, Kaitlyn (our then-two-year-old) prayed each and every night that God would send her a baby brother or sister who would stay. Then one night (right around the time that I was told that medically my body wasn't likely to conceive) she said she didn't need to pray that anymore. A few weeks later I discovered that I was a few weeks pregnant. God had answered the prayers of a two-year-old, and I, who hadn't even the faith to ask, was blessed to hold the answer in my womb.
Meanwhile things at church were getting challenging. Trevor and I were frustrated by the fact that we were very limited in what we could do to use our gifts or participate in the life of the church. They were always happy to have nursery workers, but given that there had been a recent run on little boys in the church, we were hard-pressed to feel we could cope. They finally suggested that we might run a small group for the 20-somethings. So Trevor and I spent the summer planning what material we wanted to cover. We decided there were two things we wanted to focus on: community and spiritual gifts. To focus on community, we decided to incorporate a meal into each of our weekly gatherings. These gatherings were taking place at our home, so we simply made dinner for the twenty-or-so people who came each week. The assistant pastor and his wife, who were our age, were meant to be part of this group. When we told them that we would start with a meal, they asked us "what time would it start?" We answered, "At 5:30, with the meal." They said, "No, when will the discussion start?" It was another indication that we weren't quite on the same page.
To focus on spiritual gifts, we spent the autumn learning about each of the different spiritual gifts, about how each person carries a set of gifts, and has strengths and weaknesses in ministry because of them, and that the body of Christ needs everyone to exercise their gifts together in community. We then did a gift analysis, and compiled the results for our group. Finally we decided that if we were to continue to grow on this subject, that we needed to start to put these gifts into practice. We had been gradually building over the term towards each person ministering with their gifts - encouraging those with worship gifts to lead us in worship, those with teaching gifts to help to teach the material, etc. So by the end of December, we basically had a functional small church meeting in our living room.
The problem came when we went back to the elders and said, "Our living room is getting full, please could we use the sanctuary on Saturday nights to continue to do what we are already doing, and open it up to others." They said no. The group gradually dissolved as the members felt there was no point in continuing if their gifts couldn't be recognized by the broader Body.
Hannah was born at the end of January 2004, and by May of the same year my frustrations with the church had grown to the point where I couldn't sit through a service and pretty much stopped going. We tried over the summer to sit down with the leadership and sort out our differences, but their answer was always, "just wait". And the one thing we couldn't do, was wait any more.
The Journey
Meanwhile, we had begun to hear quiet whispers about 'emergent' style church. We read Dan Kimball's "Emergent Church" and were amazed at the idea that other people were doing what we were only able to talk about - but equally amazed that other people were thinking about it, as we had thought we were the only ones. We began to try to seek out others, and eventually found a very small, very new attempt at 'emergent' in Mississauga in September (we also found the on-line community of Resonate). We joined in with gusto, thrilled to be able to give with all of our gifts. It took an hour and a half and two buses, with two small children, a guitar, sometimes a djembe, and often supper in hand to travel a distance that by car would have taken about 12 minutes, but we did it. We were involved in the worship, involved in the creative worship stations, involved in the food preparation and involved in the community. And we loved it. So it was probably the hardest element for us to leave when in June of 2005 we felt God miraculously open the doors for us to take a nine-month sabbatical to England.
Journeying
While in England we traveled extensively - we visited the ancient Christian community of Iona and the charismatic church down the road; we visited the village Kirk in Seim Farm, Norway, where my great-grandfather was baptist, and the pentecostal church in Sweden where a high school friend then lived. We visited numerous 'fresh expressions' communities. And after almost all of them we came away frustrated, feeling like we were missing the pieces we were meant to find. ... (If you're interested in this bit, feel free to go back to the 2005 and 2006 posts!)
As you can see, I can tell the story of the last ten years, but do not necessarily know how to unravel the meaning or importance of it. I do know that without the experience of Mount Carmel; without the challenges of coming to wrestle with the traditional church, or the experiences we had at The Journey; without the realities of each of our previous neighbourhoods, or of living with Trevor's family in England; and without loosing Jeremiah; we would not have the depth of experience to minister from that I know we have today. There has been much hurt over the past ten years - probably at least as much as the first eighteen - but I still hold strong to what I knew by faith as a child: that God has a purpose for my life, and that to see His purpose through, I must experience and understand so that I can empathize, and express the love of God to others.
"Blessed are those who mourn ... for they will be comforted." ~ Matthew 5:4
Putting the Pieces back together
From the day Jeremiah died till May of 2003, Kaitlyn (our then-two-year-old) prayed each and every night that God would send her a baby brother or sister who would stay. Then one night (right around the time that I was told that medically my body wasn't likely to conceive) she said she didn't need to pray that anymore. A few weeks later I discovered that I was a few weeks pregnant. God had answered the prayers of a two-year-old, and I, who hadn't even the faith to ask, was blessed to hold the answer in my womb.
Meanwhile things at church were getting challenging. Trevor and I were frustrated by the fact that we were very limited in what we could do to use our gifts or participate in the life of the church. They were always happy to have nursery workers, but given that there had been a recent run on little boys in the church, we were hard-pressed to feel we could cope. They finally suggested that we might run a small group for the 20-somethings. So Trevor and I spent the summer planning what material we wanted to cover. We decided there were two things we wanted to focus on: community and spiritual gifts. To focus on community, we decided to incorporate a meal into each of our weekly gatherings. These gatherings were taking place at our home, so we simply made dinner for the twenty-or-so people who came each week. The assistant pastor and his wife, who were our age, were meant to be part of this group. When we told them that we would start with a meal, they asked us "what time would it start?" We answered, "At 5:30, with the meal." They said, "No, when will the discussion start?" It was another indication that we weren't quite on the same page.
To focus on spiritual gifts, we spent the autumn learning about each of the different spiritual gifts, about how each person carries a set of gifts, and has strengths and weaknesses in ministry because of them, and that the body of Christ needs everyone to exercise their gifts together in community. We then did a gift analysis, and compiled the results for our group. Finally we decided that if we were to continue to grow on this subject, that we needed to start to put these gifts into practice. We had been gradually building over the term towards each person ministering with their gifts - encouraging those with worship gifts to lead us in worship, those with teaching gifts to help to teach the material, etc. So by the end of December, we basically had a functional small church meeting in our living room.
The problem came when we went back to the elders and said, "Our living room is getting full, please could we use the sanctuary on Saturday nights to continue to do what we are already doing, and open it up to others." They said no. The group gradually dissolved as the members felt there was no point in continuing if their gifts couldn't be recognized by the broader Body.
Hannah was born at the end of January 2004, and by May of the same year my frustrations with the church had grown to the point where I couldn't sit through a service and pretty much stopped going. We tried over the summer to sit down with the leadership and sort out our differences, but their answer was always, "just wait". And the one thing we couldn't do, was wait any more.
The Journey
Meanwhile, we had begun to hear quiet whispers about 'emergent' style church. We read Dan Kimball's "Emergent Church" and were amazed at the idea that other people were doing what we were only able to talk about - but equally amazed that other people were thinking about it, as we had thought we were the only ones. We began to try to seek out others, and eventually found a very small, very new attempt at 'emergent' in Mississauga in September (we also found the on-line community of Resonate). We joined in with gusto, thrilled to be able to give with all of our gifts. It took an hour and a half and two buses, with two small children, a guitar, sometimes a djembe, and often supper in hand to travel a distance that by car would have taken about 12 minutes, but we did it. We were involved in the worship, involved in the creative worship stations, involved in the food preparation and involved in the community. And we loved it. So it was probably the hardest element for us to leave when in June of 2005 we felt God miraculously open the doors for us to take a nine-month sabbatical to England.
Journeying
While in England we traveled extensively - we visited the ancient Christian community of Iona and the charismatic church down the road; we visited the village Kirk in Seim Farm, Norway, where my great-grandfather was baptist, and the pentecostal church in Sweden where a high school friend then lived. We visited numerous 'fresh expressions' communities. And after almost all of them we came away frustrated, feeling like we were missing the pieces we were meant to find. ... (If you're interested in this bit, feel free to go back to the 2005 and 2006 posts!)
As you can see, I can tell the story of the last ten years, but do not necessarily know how to unravel the meaning or importance of it. I do know that without the experience of Mount Carmel; without the challenges of coming to wrestle with the traditional church, or the experiences we had at The Journey; without the realities of each of our previous neighbourhoods, or of living with Trevor's family in England; and without loosing Jeremiah; we would not have the depth of experience to minister from that I know we have today. There has been much hurt over the past ten years - probably at least as much as the first eighteen - but I still hold strong to what I knew by faith as a child: that God has a purpose for my life, and that to see His purpose through, I must experience and understand so that I can empathize, and express the love of God to others.
No comments:
Post a Comment